There is a growing need to develop portable instrumentation for field-based detection and analysis of chemical or biological warfare agents, as well as for medical diagnostics, drug discovery, chemical synthesis, and environmental and industrial monitoring applications. Microfluidic systems incorporating micromachined devices play a key role in these new instruments, combining sample collection, preparation, and analysis all in a compact package, as well as enabling automated operation. More than just miniaturized versions of larger components manufactured using traditional methods, these fluidic devices and systems exploit unique physical phenomena and advantageous scaling laws which occur at the micro-scale, such as laminar flow and surface tension effects.
Producing truly integrated microfluidic systems, however, has proven to be a challenge in the past because many of the system components are made from different, incompatible materials, or are too complex to integrate on a single substrate. And while a great deal of work has focused on the fabrication and function of microdevices, such as micropumps, valves, etc., comparatively little has been developed in the packaging of microfluidic systems for the combined operation of such microdevices. The integration of different devices into single compact units thus presents one of the key challenges existing today to realizing robust microfluidic systems which provide highly efficient interfacing between devices or with the external environment.
It would therefore be advantageous to have a platform construction using a simple yet effective packaging process and system which enables integration of multiple microfluidic components, such as valves, pumps, filters, reservoirs, mixers, separators, power sources, connectors, electronics, optical elements (e.g. optical fibers, lasers, LEDs, other light sources, filters, and lenses) and sensors, along with microfluidic circuits into single compact units. The platform, system and technique should be flexible enough to address the unique packaging requirements in forming prototype microfluidic systems, but which is also cost-effective to easily adapt to mass production. To this end, the use of pre-fabricated building blocks for assembling the variably complex network configurations would enable rapid prototyping of microfluidic circuits in a wide range of possible configurations.